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Hey everyone,

So in the thread next door people are talking about some frustrations with the release of new codecies in quick succession, and one of the concerns is losing unique units. It has been a point of frustration for a while that older editions had a lot more options, both in terms of individual units and wargear loadouts, that were not represented by bespoke models. As far as I am aware these have largely been removed from most of the codecies.

I personally always loved converting models, even when I lacked the skill/parts. I always saw converting as an integral part of wargaming, one of the areas where hobby and gameplay interact. Sure, my combi-bolter was two bolters glued together, and I hadn't filed either one so the fit wasn't flush, one was belt-fed and one was magazine fed, and the second handle was still attached, but it was uniquely mine, and my aspiring champion had a combi-bolter.

But it's been pointed out many times that some players may be discouraged or frustrated when they put together a kit using all the special weapons only to be told it's not legal to play (which to me seems more an issue with the gaming group, no reason they couldn't proxy as regular troops, but that's me editorializing). And if the more competitive options are those that you have to convert (i.e., sorcerers with a jumppack), if you are gaming on a budget or feel that such a conversion is beyond you then I can see people getting a case of the feel-bads.

I would hate for the hobby part of the hobby to be a gatekeeper for people; I have no problems with unpainted plastic, or with (consistent, intuitive) proxies, but there are a lot of ways to reduce the barrier to entry that is painting (Contrast paints or Vallejo dips). I always saw converting as something that made certain options more accessible, not less. It might take a bit of creativity, but with access to the online wargaming community there's no shortage of inspiration. I take seriously the concern that it may not be financially viable for everyone, but I know when I was in middle and high school myself and my friends would punch-up our line troops to turn them into elites or other special characters. I still do that today - my jumppack sorcerer is just a raptor champion with a head-swap.

Obviously what's appropriate will vary from dining room table gaming to tournament tables; but I hate the idea that a tournament organizer would look at my re-based Draznight and say "you cannot use that as a Dark Apostle; that is an altered Draznight model. It is not a Dark Apostle model. Also, you cannot use those spiky Cadians as chaos cultists, even though you modified all of their lasguns to autoguns; those are Cadians with autoguns, they are not cultists."

Grains of salt, context is key, does conversion count as a proxy, "GW are model designers first and game designers second," etc. Thoughts and feelings?

Long ago when i started in 3rd we used to have wargear tables you could draw from and really customize out your hq's.. plenty of characters that didnt exist but had rules, etc etc.

these days now you have a very conviluded mess of you can take this Or take this but you can only take X if you are armed with Y but not Z, and can only take Z if you are armed with D, hell gw was so confused by it they couldnt even get the SoB canoness options right and had to FAQ an option away and replace it because the special model in the limited box was armed with an illegal configuration...

sadly we will never see the character/unit wargear table how it used to be again, and no model no rules since gw got shafted by the third party market when they decided to release rules for models or wargear option and then not make said model or wargear for years on end until someone else stepped in. so goodbye 90% of the DE characters, and various units and characters among all other factions.

Conversions are not proxies, and as long as model size is over correct there is absolutely 0% wrong with proxies. With GW's gak rules writing you should expect a lot of test games before you invest into buying a model. That's just being smart with your money.

Still waiting on Doomrider.

Well ChapterHouse case is to blame for all this... or at least GW’s response when it was apparently legal to fill GW’s model gaps they left for years. I honestly love the idea of converting and kit bashing too. I also doubt any gaming table is going to have a problem with any of those examples and as far as I know generally TO’s agree to a requirement that 75% of the model has to be GW. As for GW yeeting models with no rules or putting them in legends, that has been incredibly annoying and has evoked much anger and frustration from me. Especially since the HQ’s I lost were in my opinion vital to my army to not having cookie cutter lists (CSM). Losing more war gear options between editions also hurt... I completely agree with you though. Chapterhouse happened because GW did bad business and it’s incredibly wrong and unethical to make their customers pay for it.

The CHS debacle was basically the tag line from the Aliens vs Predator movie: "Whoever wins, we lose."

We had hoped that this would mean GW would make models for all the units that had languished without one. Instead we got the opposite, with them just dumping the things that didn't have miniatures. And this has of course led to the stupid Adjective Nounverb naming conventions, the increasingly obnoxious wargear limitations, and the less customisation and more-monopose miniature design.

CHS may not exist anymore, but GW's customers were the ones that lost out in that legal battle.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The CHS debacle was basically the tag line from the Aliens vs Predator movie: "Whoever wins, we lose."

We had hoped that this would mean GW would make models for all the units that had languished without one. Instead we got the opposite, with them just dumping the things that didn't have miniatures. And this has of course led to the stupid Adjective Nounverb naming conventions, the increasingly obnoxious wargear limitations, and the less customisation and more-monopose miniature design.

CHS may not exist anymore, but GW's customers were the ones that lost out in that legal battle.

And yet it changed nothing in regards to 3rd party products. There is now more 3rd party than ever before. The 3d printing arena has exploded.

All GW have done is actually force 3rd party to compete with them directly rather than indirectly. So now we just get actual equivalent models rather than stand ins for stuff that doesn't exist.

But gw gets actual model in first. That's the goal for gw. Ensure 3rd party doesn't flood market with alternative first

tneva82 wrote:
But gw gets actual model in first. That's the goal for gw. Ensure 3rd party doesn't flood market with alternative first

Sure, but the market is sustaining competition for basic stuff, like guardsmen and Eldar aspect warriors.

Being able to pivot quickly to sell a model that doesn't exist is fine, but unless preventing this puts them out of business it's not doing much. That very narrow business model wasn't the life blood of the 3rd party sector

I play more rulesets that don't even have a bespoke miniatures line than I play GW. From the outside, GW's player base's need for official handholding is bizarre.

 Hellebore wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
But gw gets actual model in first. That's the goal for gw. Ensure 3rd party doesn't flood market with alternative first

Sure, but the market is sustaining competition for basic stuff, like guardsmen and Eldar aspect warriors.

Being able to pivot quickly to sell a model that doesn't exist is fine, but unless preventing this puts them out of business it's not doing much. That very narrow business model wasn't the life blood of the 3rd party sector

90% of the third party market are upgrade bits etc. salamander shoulder pads, space wolf capes etc.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
But gw gets actual model in first. That's the goal for gw. Ensure 3rd party doesn't flood market with alternative first

Sure, but the market is sustaining competition for basic stuff, like guardsmen and Eldar aspect warriors.

Being able to pivot quickly to sell a model that doesn't exist is fine, but unless preventing this puts them out of business it's not doing much. That very narrow business model wasn't the life blood of the 3rd party sector

90% of the third party market are upgrade bits etc. salamander shoulder pads, space wolf capes etc.

i honestly dont think so, and now with 3d printing becoming more normal. The full minis category is exploding, as well as a lot of company that are doing bits will do a full kit along with those bits anyway.

I play Orks, me.

We make the models and them make the rules fit. Ork Wartrike and Gun Trukks (counts as KBB)

I loved it, and still do. 40k seems to be this aberration now, with hobbyists needing their hands held for every little thing (which in turn bleeds into other games when they realise they are on their own and the entitled rants come along...), even down to whether their paints are "official".

Back when I joined this hobby back in 1997, converting was not exactly expected, but it was a core of the hobby. It was (and still is, before anyone jumps on this) a mark of levelling up in the hobby. It's a small mark of pride knowing you a have a miniature that potentially no one else in the world has. GW leaned into this heavily with their massive back catalogues and characters that did not (or ever did) get minis. They were there for you to convert, for you to put your own spin on what that character looked like based only on either a small boxout of art and/or a descriptive paragraph. There were reams and reams of material to show some outlandish conversions, those John Blanche pages from the CSM and SOB codexes are like seminal pieces of conversion history.

So, yeah. I got bit by the converting bug early on. I find it one of the biggest tragedies that new hobbyists are handcuffed by GW's ecosystem and are ignorant of the massive library of bits and the customisation potential of these minis being one of the GW's biggest selling points for their games over their competition. It's a strange irony where GW still wants to push this to an extent by being very inconsistent with their "no model, no rules" has no back catalogue of individual parts to customise from, yet PP with a game that kinda stymies conversions a little has a full catalogue of their parts, because reasons.

Then, if they break out into other games it goes one of two ways. Either they moan that it's "not like GW" and they have to do some modelling in a modelling hobby (oh noes!) or they put on their big boy pants and see what a miniature agnostic game system can truly be like.

On a related note, the same goes for terrain a little bit too. Everything is out of the box and homogenised. I'm glad for the existence of channels like BlackMagicCraft, Bard's Craft, TheDMsCraft, Wyloch, Tabletop Engineer, Franky D Crafter, Tabletop Witchcraft (the list goes on) that are still pushing the idea that making your own terrain is fun, easy and perfectly okay to do. TBH, those (and others) are the guys that are where my converting energy tends to go more frequently. Hopefully it will catch on with minis too and channels like Scratch Bashing will grow and people will see that converting and bashing things together are quite normal and encouraged.

 Grimtuff wrote:
I loved it, and still do. 40k seems to be this aberration now, with hobbyists needing their hands held for every little thing (which in turn bleeds into other games when they realise they are on their own and the entitled rants come along...), even down to whether their paints are "official".

I don't think calling it hand-holding is fair.

I can shove a Thunderhammer on my Outrider Sergeant right now. It wouldn't take any effort at all beyond removing the part from the sprue and cleaning the mould lines off. But the rules for Outriders don't allow Sergeants with Thunderhammers (yet... or ever - we don't know!). So I don't need to be hand-held and told what I can and cannot use. I need GW to be freer with their rules and let me make what I want to make.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:
I loved it, and still do. 40k seems to be this aberration now, with hobbyists needing their hands held for every little thing (which in turn bleeds into other games when they realise they are on their own and the entitled rants come along...), even down to whether their paints are "official".

I don't think calling it hand-holding is fair.

I can shove a Thunderhammer on my Outrider Sergeant right now. It wouldn't take any effort at all beyond removing the part from the sprue and cleaning the mould lines off. But the rules for Outriders don't allow Sergeants with Thunderhammers (yet... or ever - we don't know!). So I don't need to be hand-held and told what I can and cannot use. I need GW to be freer with their rules and let me make what I want to make.

Sorry, should have clarified a bit. I'm not referring to you or I, that have been in this hobby for a while and know this stuff and what GW frankly should be doing and playing to their strengths. I'm referring to how a newer hobbyist perceives the hobby and how it colours their whole perception going forward of how "things should be" (yes yes, given my previous sentence. But it's true) in the greater hobby. Converting and scracthbuilding are like alien concepts to them (so much so the latter term is frequently misused by someone kitbashing something), because no one taught them it was a thing when in the GW sphere. I've seen it too many times on places like Reddit etc.

 Grimtuff wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:
I loved it, and still do. 40k seems to be this aberration now, with hobbyists needing their hands held for every little thing (which in turn bleeds into other games when they realise they are on their own and the entitled rants come along...), even down to whether their paints are "official".

I don't think calling it hand-holding is fair.

I can shove a Thunderhammer on my Outrider Sergeant right now. It wouldn't take any effort at all beyond removing the part from the sprue and cleaning the mould lines off. But the rules for Outriders don't allow Sergeants with Thunderhammers (yet... or ever - we don't know!). So I don't need to be hand-held and told what I can and cannot use. I need GW to be freer with their rules and let me make what I want to make.

Sorry, should have clarified a bit. I'm not referring to you or I, that have been in this hobby for a while and know this stuff and what GW frankly should be doing and playing to their strengths. I'm referring to how a newer hobbyist perceives the hobby and how it colours their whole perception going forward of how "things should be" (yes yes, given my previous sentence. But it's true) in the greater hobby. Converting and scracthbuilding are like alien concepts to them (so much so the latter term is frequently misused by someone kitbashing something), because no one taught them it was a thing when in the GW sphere. I've seen it too many times on places like Reddit etc.

One thing i had thought was how often people said they hated Warmachine for not having custmizability on units, And yet now here we stand with 40k going full force into basically the same style and its being embraced as the new norm. Its just a funny thing, GW really just gets its lower standard i think.

To me 40k without scratch building, converting and kitbashing doesn't even exist. And I'm very pissed that GW removed options that didn't have an official model or bitz.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:
I loved it, and still do. 40k seems to be this aberration now, with hobbyists needing their hands held for every little thing (which in turn bleeds into other games when they realise they are on their own and the entitled rants come along...), even down to whether their paints are "official".

I don't think calling it hand-holding is fair.

I can shove a Thunderhammer on my Outrider Sergeant right now. It wouldn't take any effort at all beyond removing the part from the sprue and cleaning the mould lines off. But the rules for Outriders don't allow Sergeants with Thunderhammers (yet... or ever - we don't know!). So I don't need to be hand-held and told what I can and cannot use. I need GW to be freer with their rules and let me make what I want to make.

I believe Grimtuff is talking about things like the thread in Painting right now where a newer player is complaining how the Nobz box only comes with 4 choppas when the rules allow for 5 and there is a chorus or people agreeing that this is an insurmountable obstacle.

I reckon that the majority of Drukhari players who use Grotesques, do so with kitbashed models. The only alternative being a monopose finecast kit costing £15 per model helps encourage that creativity.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

I can shove a Thunderhammer on my Outrider Sergeant right now. It wouldn't take any effort at all beyond removing the part from the sprue and cleaning the mould lines off. But the rules for Outriders don't allow Sergeants with Thunderhammers (yet... or ever - we don't know!). So I don't need to be hand-held and told what I can and cannot use. I need GW to be freer with their rules and let me make what I want to make.

This basically sums up my feelings on the matter.

I enjoy converting but I also want to be able to use my conversions on the table. Hence, I despise how many options and how much wargear has been removed outright, because it means there's really very little for me to meaningfully convert.

In the past, as was said above, there were whole tables of wargear for HQs. Now it's a case of 'I guess my converted Archon will have a Huskblade and Blast Pistol, instead of the usual Huskblade and Splinter Pistol.'

And if I want to use the Archon I converted to have wings, then I have to play a different army altogether.

Get fethed, GW.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:
I loved it, and still do. 40k seems to be this aberration now, with hobbyists needing their hands held for every little thing (which in turn bleeds into other games when they realise they are on their own and the entitled rants come along...), even down to whether their paints are "official".

I don't think calling it hand-holding is fair.

I can shove a Thunderhammer on my Outrider Sergeant right now. It wouldn't take any effort at all beyond removing the part from the sprue and cleaning the mould lines off. But the rules for Outriders don't allow Sergeants with Thunderhammers (yet... or ever - we don't know!). So I don't need to be hand-held and told what I can and cannot use. I need GW to be freer with their rules and let me make what I want to make.

I believe Grimtuff is talking about things like the thread in Painting right now where a newer player is complaining how the Nobz box only comes with 4 choppas when the rules allow for 5 and there is a chorus or people agreeing that this is an insurmountable obstacle.

That thread was so bizarre. Axes, especially Ork and other bodged together or low-quality looking ones are super easy to convert. You don't even need a mythical deep bits box. Plastic rod and plasticard. Done. Even looking at the parts in the Nob kit in isolation, you can easily fashion a 5th Big Choppa out of the bits in that kit alone.

I rant on this topic periodically when it comes up. It’s my biggest gripe with the hobby today. Yes, more than the prices.

I also remember the heyday of supported conversions. IMHO it was a golden time of the hobby as a whole. Great time to explore modeling and creativity. Even if mostly in metal.

One thing that bugs me about NMNR is that it’s so arbitrary. SM captains are locked into very specific loadouts. He can have a powerfist, but only if he takes a plasma pistol with it. Or intercessor sarges can take options, but not hellblasters. Despite the fact that the chapter upgrade sprues are 100% compatible. That isn’t even a “just what’s in the box” issue, or a game balance one. I understand their twisted logic, but they don’t even follow it.

And then there is the random legacy things. Like sternguard sarges called out for not taking thunderhammers. Because sticking one on a 3A base model would break the game <glares at intercessors>

I hope they change it in the next codex. but I’m not holding my breath.

 Grimtuff wrote:
Sorry, should have clarified a bit. I'm not referring to you or I, that have been in this hobby for a while and know this stuff and what GW frankly should be doing and playing to their strengths. I'm referring to how a newer hobbyist perceives the hobby and how it colours their whole perception going forward of how "things should be" (yes yes, given my previous sentence. But it's true) in the greater hobby. Converting and scracthbuilding are like alien concepts to them (so much so the latter term is frequently misused by someone kitbashing something), because no one taught them it was a thing when in the GW sphere. I've seen it too many times on places like Reddit etc.

Ok, right, I see where you're coming from now. And I agree.

Thing is, as much as I apply Hanlon's Razor to the decisions GW makes, the efforts to slowly weed out customisation, both form a rules and especially from a miniature perspective are, I suspect, 100% intentional. Minis didn't become less kitbashable (if that's a word) by accident.

I think that's kinda why I like making terrain so much. I can do whatever I want, whatever the kits allow, and then see how far I can stretch the kits to make newer and more interesting things. And I don't have to worry about rules!

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Thing is, as much as I apply Hanlon's Razor to the decisions GW makes, the efforts to slowly weed out customisation, both form a rules and especially from a miniature perspective are, I suspect, 100% intentional. Minis didn't become less kitbashable (if that's a word) by accident.

NMNR is obviously a thing, but even I don't believe that GW goes out of their way to make models less convertible. I think it's simply that kitbashability isn't something they consider at all, and it is simply naturally diminished as models become more detailed and cut up more efficiently (from a sense of fitting more on a sprue and holding more detail). That and still trying to imitate Warmachine by making bespoke rules and weapons for everything instead of having standardized wargear.

Wow, I didn't expect to get so many responses overnight! Thanks for your opinions, all. Seems like there's a lot of accord between the Dakkanauts, which in retrospect makes a lot of sense. @Lord_Blackfang - I agree - plastic monopose models offer the same challenges that pewter monopose models did, but they have the advantage of being easier to slice and dice. I'm not the first person to point this out but it's basically going full circle back to monopose pewter models, but the tradeoff is higher-quality sculpts and easier conversions. It took me a while to get on board with it but I think I've come around.

I think the dialogue between Grimtuff and HBMC has done a good job of getting into some frustrations I feel. And to Nevelon's point about it being arbitrary - Reaper Chaincannon becomes the new hotness. You can take four - but there's only one in the box. So without ever buying the new havoc models (because I already have enough havocs, thank you, although I do love pretty much all of the new CSM releases) I was able to plop two chaincannons into my CSM squad, one by combining a heavy bolter with an extra Obliterator arm and another by combining an autocannon with the barrel from the heldrake's hades autocannon. Not trying to boast, just are trying to illustrate that even for specialty weapons (i.e., not just choppers) there are work-arounds.

But when Games Workshop says that you can play with everything out of the box, the need to convert or find those workarounds becomes an unwritten rule; and that can create some feel-bads. When GW encouraged conversions explicitly (we would spend hours flipping through those Bitz Catalogues), it didn't seem like an impossible challenge to overcome. So where I imagine new players get frustrated is that they're basically being lied to; they do in fact need to develop certain hobby skills, or else buy four boxes of havocs for four chaincannons.

One of the issues is there is no happy medium that GW can choose. On on hand, people are unhappy because they can’t do easy kitbashes/conversions because the rules don’t support them. On the other hand, please lose their because there is only one chaincannon in the Havock kit and there are not enough chainswords in the Chaos Terminator box to are the whole squad. I can’t imagine an easier conversion in all of 40K than making a random melee weapon are into a chainsword, but people complain about that whenever a ‘what is in the kit’ discussion happens.

Aren't csm players irked by the fact that if they take a havock chaingun guy to put in to a csm unit, then he has a different base?

Asking because stuff like that would drive me wild.

I think units that can be made easily using GW miniatures should be printed in a codex, something like an Ork Warboss on bike conversion or Necron Overlord with voidblade are okay, but something like a brand new model or set of models like Necron Night Scythes or Space Marines Primaris Outriders are too much, you can interpret one or two pieces of art of a model in a lot of different ways and I don't think that's ideal. While some armies do lend themselves to

Most units shouldn't even get a proper datasheet when they get a model, they should get a beta datasheet for at least a few months before it gets put into a codex IMO and if a unit remains in beta for 3 years then that's fine in my book. Codexes are weird because they contain fluff, crunch and art. Most art isn't worth redoing every 3 years, maybe every 9-12 years 90% of art needs to be shifted out, but most art can last a good while. Fluff has gotten more important to update now that the story has gotten moving since 7th edition, but crunch is what IMO is pushing the update schedule of codexes. For me the logical conclusion is to seperate the crunch into indexes and chapter approved books and move the fluff and narrative stuff from Chapter Approved into codexes.

Codexes and campaigns for narrative, indexes for everyone, Chapter Approved for matched play. Update indexes every 3-5 years, CA once a year, codexes and campaigns as the GW writing teams have time to push them out, no rush.

 alextroy wrote:
One of the issues is there is no happy medium that GW can choose. On on hand, people are unhappy because they can’t do easy kitbashes/conversions because the rules don’t support them. On the other hand, please lose their because there is only one chaincannon in the Havock kit and there are not enough chainswords in the Chaos Terminator box to are the whole squad. I can’t imagine an easier conversion in all of 40K than making a random melee weapon are into a chainsword, but people complain about that whenever a ‘what is in the kit’ discussion happens.

I think it was chainaxes, not chainswords, that was the problem for CSM Terminators - their basic melee weapon only comes one to a box is a bit weird, and a chainaxe is a [i]bit[/u] rarer than a chainsword.

Mind you, this is the sort of thing where a direct-only sprue of chainaxes could be a thing, for a couple of quid (or actually including the parts for the default basic loadout int he box, but who'd do that sort of thing?)